SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 31, 2008

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Google 2001 Search: Party’s OverTonight is your last chance to search through a 2001 version of Google’s index. On Thursday, Google added this warning to the search page: “Google 2001 will no longer be available after tomorrow.” The 2001 search was put online as part of Google’s recent 10th birthday celebration, and was never planned to be a permanent feature.

Google, Yahoo Prepare To Abandon Paid Search Deal?Despite public pronouncements of confidence by Google and Yahoo about the future of their paid search deal, which was partly set up to fend off Microsoft and hostile Yahoo shareholders who wanted a Microsoft takeover, the emerging consensus is that it’s not going to happen. The Wall Street Journal this morning reports that the parties are not coming to terms and the US Justice Department wants concessions that the search engines don’t like.

Google Now Allowing Ads For BeerTaylor Pratt discovered a very quiet change made to Google AdWords policy for handling alcohol ads. Now, Google is allowing search ads for beer, wine and champagne to show up on Google.com. Google’s policy says they allow these ads, “since we consider beer, wine, and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption by adults, ads promoting these products will be given a Non-FamilySafe status.” Why did Google make this change? Why did Google first have a ban on beer, wine and champagne ads and now remove that restriction? Why now?

Google Updates AdWords Quality Score To Be “Fairer”The Google AdWords Blog announced that two new changes to the quality score is coming in the next few days. The first change is to make the quality score calculation score an ad’s CTR based on the ad’s position. The second change is to help enable certain ads to be promoted to the top position.

Spooky Search Engines On HalloweenGoogle, Yahoo, Live, Ask, DogPile and many more are celebrating Halloween with special spooky logos or themes. Below you will find the logos and themes I spotted throughout the search industry. Google seems to have totally ‘geeked out’ the fear in Halloween by adding spooky thoughts to their robots.txt file: User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains

The Secret Influence of Search BehaviorDid you know that Rachel Ray grounds up toasted pumpkin seeds, adds some herbs and uses the mixture to coat chicken? Me neither. One day, after my daughter mentioned this to me, I started thinking about how people’s eating habits are changing everywhere. More fast food restaurants serve healthier, lower fat meals. Today’s families use different herbs to prepare food than their parents’ generation. In my house, you may find your salad has apple, pineapple or oranges in it. A few years ago, I would never have had the idea to do that to a salad. Nor would there have been printed recipes from Rachel Ray’s web site piled on the kitchen counter. What’s happening? The Internet. How? By making more information available online, our habits are changing. We’re teaching one another new tricks and evolving together. We’re sharing more stories by way of social networking. We’re learning new ways for doing the same old things. We’re willing to be talked into most anything, especially if we read it on the web, in an email from a friend or click a search engine result that looks credible.

Finding The Sweet SpotMany of our customers are companies who sell online marketing services to small businesses. When they come to us for sales leads, they usually know exactly what they want – what profile of businesses they‘re looking for and from which sites they’d like us to get the leads. Nevertheless, we do have customers who come to us asking we point them in the right direction – they want to know what the top categories of SMBs advertising online are, or in other words where the sweet spot is. While there are many lists and reports out there, such as this YPA’s Top 10 IYP Headings, we wanted to provide our customers with real-time information on leading revenue-generating categories of SMBs who advertise online.

Google Using OCR To Index Scanned DocumentsIt used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn’t recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents. According to an announcement today, that’s no longer the case. Google says it’s now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to read any scanned documents that it finds in PDF format:

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